I had the window. He had the aisle. My earbuds were in before I sat down, which is the universal signal for please do not talk to me, I have been in four airports this week and I have nothing left to give.

Then he said something. I do not even remember what. And I took the earbuds out, which I almost never do.

Three hours later we were still going.

His name is Terrell Powell. He is an artist out of Santa Fe (a real artist!), and his work is bright and strange and a little bit folk-art holy. But that is not the part that got me. The part that got me is what he does in hotel rooms, and the pure joy with which he talks about it.

He travels with acrylics and brushes. When he checks into a room and finds one of those mass-produced prints bolted to the wall (you know the one, the beige abstract that looks like a fax of a painting), he takes it down. He paints on it. A wide-eyed owl holding a rainbow jump rope. A monkey where no monkey was. A giant fish getting hauled out of a perfectly boring stream. Then he hangs it back on the wall, signs it T Bang, and checks out.

He has been doing this for twelve years. He is working his way toward every state and on our trip, was nailing Hawaii, one of the last before he puts it all together in a book. NBC has sent a crew to where he paints. He told a reporter about one particular hotel print, “It was just some ugly, abstract thing that needed a T Bang on it.”

He talked about all of it the way most of us used to talk when we were kids who discovered something new for the first time, like, Wow!

And here is what has been rattling around in me ever since somewhere over Denver.

Nobody is paying him for this. There is no funnel. There is no brand strategy, no quarterly objective, no line item attached to a monkey in a Holiday Inn Express. He does it because it delights him. It started as a distraction from the four walls he stared at in Vegas for a week and it grew, and he kept following it, and now it is part of who he is.

The truth is, I could not remember the last time I did something in my own work purely because it delighted me.

That is an uncomfortable thing to admit out loud. I have spent twenty-six years building a company on the premise that work can be fit for human life. My calendar is full of good work. Important work. Work I chose on purpose and would choose again. And somewhere in the choosing, delight got quietly scheduled out. Not by anyone else. By me.

And yet.

This is not a soft thing. My own research catalogues and notes that when we thrive at work, everything is better, and that certain things help us thrive and certain things cause us to wither at work. Joy is not the reward you get after the work. It is part of what makes any work good.

So I have been asking myself a smaller, more honest question than am I fulfilled. Just this: where in my week does something make me laugh out loud, and could I do more of that on purpose?

If you want to try it, here are a few ways to T Bang your own workweek. Pick one. Do not build a system around it.

Repaint one recurring meeting. Not the agenda. The feel of it. Open with something true and fun instead of something efficient.

Make one thing nobody asked for. A weird deck. A hand-drawn map of how your team actually works. Something with your fingerprints on it that will never appear in a quarterly review.

Notice who lights up. Somebody on your team has a T Bang in them. They are doing it in the margins, slightly embarrassed about it. Ask. Then get out of the way.

Take the earbuds out. The conversation you are avoiding might be the best three hours of your month.

I do not know if that owl is still hanging on the wall in North Little Rock. A reporter went to the hotel to look, which delights me almost as much as the owl.

But I know I want to be the kind of person who (metaphorically) paints the monkey where it is not expected just because it makes life a little better for someone.

What spontaneous act or beauty shot could you infuse in your day today? I'm gonna surprise someone with homemade jam. Hit reply. I read every one.

Terrell Powell’s work is at terrellpowellartist.com. The T Bang page is worth your time. The artist himself and I during our flight.